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From: uh311ae@sunmanager.lrz-muenchen.de (Henrik Klagges)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.neural-nets
Subject: 5 Giga Connections per Second
Keywords: Opinions wanted
Message-ID: <uh311ae.673013709@sunmanager>
Date: 30 Apr 91 12:15:09 GMT
Sender: news@Informatik.TU-Muenchen.DE
Organization: Technische Universitaet Muenchen, Germany
Lines: 16

Hello !
I heard that neural networks hardware is advancing. Current specifications
lie in the range of:
- 5 giga connections / s peak
- 1 G conn. updates / s backprop learning rate
- 1 M connection capacity
- integer representation with 1, 8, 16 bits, signed/unsigned
- workstation interface with Ethernet , net algorithm library, debugger,
  visualizer, C interface
Do you think this is real ? Do you know about companies actually 
selling/using such units ? Specifically, is 8bit quantization enough for
most algorithms - this would be nice, because then the logistic acfunc
could be put into a table (super-hoopey-fast) ?
Last not least, what the hell do we need this for ?
Thank you for feedback, yours, Henrik Klagges
University of Munich, Physics Department